“... of the details of Susan’s daily life are borrowed from Dorothy Parker’s Diary of a New York Lady, written in the Forties and subtitled ‘During Days of Horror, Despair and World Change’. Parker’s empty-headed, self-centred diarist has a marriage on the rocks (‘Joe left word with the butler he’s going to the country this afternoon for the ...”

“... The frame yawns to a living-room. Slim Whitman warbles through the hum of a bad earth. The Green Lady cries over the scene: you, compromised, steadily drawing out the juice of the one man you could not seduce, but his legs are sliding up his shorts, his mouth drops open in its slot and at the point you suss his groans come not from his throat, but your ...”

“... him, just as his arrows sting lovers.) Cranach’s Venus stands in the wild wood, more like the lady in the ballad who abducts True Thomas from a goddess. Faint, downy wisps of pubic hair suggest that she is a distant ancestress of Balthus’s nymphets, yet body and face are ageless rather than young. Much of the catalogue (Paul Holberton, £20) is ...”

“... in a film until it actually happens, it does seem likely that this autumn we will be shooting The Lady in the Van. This is the story of Miss Mary Shepherd, the elderly eccentric who took up residence in my garden in 1974, living there in a van until her death 15 years later. Maggie Smith played Miss Shepherd on the stage in 1999 and all being well will star ...”

“... a tincture of opium, but he goes and he is instantly enraptured by Miss Chumley, an orphan Lady Somerset is taking out to India. They get along very well, and on returning to his ship Talbot, still very strange, takes over Colley’s cabin to leave his for her. They get on even better at the ball in spite of some trouble from Deverel, drunk in defiance ...”

“... copies of unknown men, women and children stacked around the walls of his studio he found the lady.’ Hunty’s pen raced. Lennox emptied his brandy glass. Hunty loudly called for more. The beautiful young colleen who enchanted the heart of James Joyce, shapely and red-haired, her eyelashes still moist with the dews of Connemara ... Great ...”

“... on Port an expert, and a joker, had died not long ago, and Violet resided with her aunt. This lady was of the kind of learned booby that abounds in England – unlike her brother, thin and haughty, she always used a walking stick, she delivered lectures to the workers, she revered culture’s ideal and considered – inter al.– Kharkov a Russian ...”

“... conceived as a serious highbrow literary quarterly subsidised by the arts-dabbling socialite Lady Rothermere, wife of the younger of the Harmsworth press barons. He had quickly made it both the leading journal for mainstream modernism in literature and the home of an anti-liberal, anti-romantic form of classicism in culture and politics more ...”

“... his old Fabian intimates, the Webbs and Wells, and had a joky intimacy with persons as diverse as Lady Astor, Virginia Woolf and the heavyweight champion Gene Tunney. He was sporadically in touch, affectionate and censorious, with Mrs Patrick Campbell, and kept a kindness for scapegraces such as Lord Alfred Douglas and Frank Harris, in whose biography of Shaw ...”

“... public who simply refused to read his books: after the last mild success of The Portrait of a Lady in 1881, James experienced half a lifetime of small and dwindling sales, which culminated, in the case of the New York Collected Edition, in total failure. Edith made thousands. But of course both she and the contemporary reading public had a point. There ...”

“... with something approaching innocence; at other times, as with Madame Merle in The Portrait of a Lady or Kate Croy in The Wings of the Dove, it would be done out of dark need; in the end, as with Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl, it would be done with aplomb and so stylishly that no one was sure they had noticed. During this first visit alone to ...”

“... baby’s father was charged but never stood trial.) Prison visits by upper-middle-class lady well-wishers, following Elizabeth Fry’s example, aimed to save the inmates from themselves: the Lady Visitors’ Association, founded in 1901 and active at Holloway, was ‘a body of earnest and devoted ladies with ...”

“... as an escort. Instead, she resolved to maintain the Palatine court-in-exile, admitting to a former lady-in-waiting her surprise at the turn of events that had seen her ‘become a stateswoman, which of all things I have ever hated’. In her quest to secure Palatine restitution, Elizabeth attracted unswerving devotion from an older generation of ...”

“... the future tense of the verbs.’ The language lessons were deemed advisable in that the lucky lady was a Miss Anna Eyre Powell, whose father owned land in both Ireland and England: ‘a girl who is a dream from Ossian,’ Villiers wrote to Judith Gautier. After an exchange of letters Villiers took himself off to England, staying at the Grosvenor Hotel in ...”

“... been invaded by the American Friendship Society (‘Lois Ravenna Jr,’ says the name tag of the lady opposite). They are a middle-aged to elderly group, ladies whom I would call ‘game’ (and Barry Humphreys ‘spunky’). They know they cannot expect the creature comforts on offer at the Wichita Hilton but they are determined not to complain or be ...”